Refugees and Immigration

I knew about the Perimeter Institute but I hadn't looked too deeply. But today I'm watching videos of Leonard Susskind lecture on physics and I noticed on his Wikipedia page that he is a member of the Perimeter Institute.

So I looked that up and discovered that this Institute was set up by a Greek refugee, Mike Lazaridis, fleeing from Turkish persecution. That refugee ended up being the CEO of RIM and gave $100 million to set up the Institute. That is a pretty big "investment" return to Canada for accepting this refugee.

But there is more... Lazaridis has given over $100 million to the University of Waterloo where he attended but dropped out. The University has returned the favour by granting him an honorary degree.

I'm always hard pressed to understand the anger that the US public has against refugees and immigrants. It is a streak that has run through the country from nearly the beginning. It is especially odd because the US has so obviously benefited from the immigrants that made the US a home.

When I worked in high-tech R&D we had staff from Europe, Israel, Iran, China, etc. The native Canadians were well in the minority on the staff. Canada has been influenced by the US and is making it harder to immigrate to this country. The guys we were hiring with PhDs had to pay $2000 to the Canadian government to get their paperwork done. This is a hurdle, but a small one, with a PhD diploma. But for the hardworking poor, it is an insurmountable hurder. This is a tragedy. As the Mike Lazaridis story makes clear, if you turn away immigrants, you are throwing away wealth creation.

The new immigration law in Arizona that targets Mexican illegals is a shame. It would have effectively kept people like the following from coming to the US:

Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa is an example of an illegal immigrant who came to the US and has done wonderful things. Read this article in NPR:

The life of Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, a former illegal immigrant, may sound like a movie script, but it is no fiction.

Twenty years ago, he hopped a border fence from Mexico into the United States and became a migrant farmworker.

Today, he is a neurosurgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins University, and a researcher who is looking for a breakthrough in the treatment of brain cancer.

Hector de Jesus Ruiz is an example of an immigrant who was wildly successful:

Ruiz was born in the border town of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico. As a teenager, he walked across the Mexico – United States border every day to attend a high school in nearby Eagle Pass, Texas, from which he graduated as valedictorian just three years after beginning to learn English. Ruiz earned a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1968 and 1970 respectively and a Ph.D. from Rice University in 1973. In 2002 he was CEO of the chip maker AMD and in 2004 became Chairman of the Board.

The modern US reaction to this wealth of energy, talent, and enthusiasm surging across the border? Well, watch how John McCain is willing to welcome the wealth creation and hard work on offer...



The joke is that anti-immigrant laws only keep the hard-working value-creating immigrants out. Those criminals who seek to rape & pillage won't be stopped by a law.

In my mind, the right to vote is a fundamental right that allows people to control their government. But that right sometimes fails because fanatics take control. The last line of defense is "open borders". If people can vote with their feet, bad governments would fall. Think of how much richer the US would have been if those desperate Jews from Europe were accepted instead of boxed in and ultimately rounded up and killed by the Nazi killing machine. If people could have freely left Germany and freely immigrated to a better country, the Nazis would have ruled a rump state, impotent to carry out its plans for a "Thousand Year Reich".

As for those who think that opening borders would result in a rush on their borders and a collapse of their country, I don't think so. The vast majority of people would really prefer to stay near where they are born. The numbers who want to flee because of political repression or a madman like Mugabe destroying their local economy is not that great. These economic migrants are self-limiting. They come because they believe they can better their lives. They won't come if there are no jobs an no prospect of a job.